Timeline for Why does undergraduate discrete math require calculus?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 12, 2011 at 17:47 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Jun 5, 2010 at 7:23 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | I could guess it wasn't in the USA from your description of "our standard calculus course":) | |
| Jun 5, 2010 at 7:06 | comment | added | engelbrekt | Our standard calculus course is oriented towards rigorous proofs, so it is unrealistic to expect all students to be well enough prepared for it in the first semester. We start from the completeness property of $\mathbb{R}$ and prove the major theorems, such as the Extreme Value Theorem, the Intermediate Value Theorem, the Riemann integrability of monotone functions, the Riemann integrability of continuous functions, and the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. By the way, the place where I work is not that big, and we cannot have many tailor-made calculus courses, like in the USA. | |
| Jun 5, 2010 at 6:56 | comment | added | engelbrekt | Well, if I say where I work, I might as well not have a pseudonym at all. The introductory discrete math course is offered because of demand from the computer science department. The CS students are required to take calculus, but not in their first year. The CS students are also required to take an introductory probability and statistics course, and calculus is a prerequisite for that. Basically, we have to adapt our earliest courses to the needs of other departments. We also have a less demanding, cookbook calculus course, for students outside the hard sciences, like biology. | |
| Jun 5, 2010 at 6:38 | comment | added | Gwyn Whieldon | ...for them that math classes are a series of irrelevant hoops thrown at them by people extorting them for money. If the goal of forcing students to take a math class is to give them (hopefully) both critical reasoning skills and potentially useful math, it doesn't seem that his school is sacrificing their "education." It's frustrating lying to (many) students about how "they'll use calculus in their further studies" when you know that the vast majority of them will not - and will just leave with the confirmed belief that "math is hard and isn't for them." | |
| Jun 5, 2010 at 6:35 | comment | added | Gwyn Whieldon | That's not a fair assessment at all. Trying to convince a pure humanities student (or even a biologist) that they are going to need to know how to integrate is difficult - because chances are, although they might be balancing their checkbook or examining their investments at some point, frankly they probably WON'T be using their first semester calculus.The applicable math will generally be RE-taught in whatever bio classes require it in as much form as they'll tend to use it, and for the rest of them who never see it comes up again it confirms... | |
| Jun 5, 2010 at 6:03 | comment | added | The Mathemagician | Apparently a university where selling courses to the maximum number of students is a higher priority then educating them,Victor. | |
| Jun 4, 2010 at 22:04 | comment | added | Victor Protsak | Where do you work? | |
| Jun 4, 2010 at 19:15 | history | answered | engelbrekt | CC BY-SA 2.5 |